Companies Are Putting Sensors On Employees To Track Their Every Move

The idea of having employees walk around with electronic sensors
to track their every move is unsettling. There are privacy and
legal issues, and who wants to feel like they are just a cog in a
system?

Sociometric
Solutions has created tracking devices for Bank of America, Steelcase, and Cubist
Pharmaceuticals Inc., and is in talks with General
Motors. It was started by a team of Ph.D students from MIT who
decided to study the chemistry behind what makes certain
workspaces like Google great at building teams. They came up
with sensors placed in employee
identification badges that gatherreal-time
informationto help companies measure
productivity. The sensors identify a person's tone of voice,
movement and even their posture when communicating with
others.

"Google
really cares about creating a community because
the social conversations — the ones at the
water cooler, coffee maker — those are the ones that have the
biggest impact," says Ben Waber, president of
Sociometrics and one of the company's founders."In
the U.S., there's this notion that your most productive time is
when you're sitting at your desk staring at the computer," and
that's not necessarily true.

The sensors
are intended to measure when and how employees are truly
productive. While individual information is collected, it's
anonymized to provide metadata and hedge against privacy
concerns. The information is then used to suggest how employees,
and the company as a whole, can work more efficiently.

"The legality
behind this," says Arena, "that's the biggest unanswered
question. Privacy online is sort of open and privacy issues are
going to be the stumbling block for a long time. And that's a
big, big question."

The tracking
sensors

Waber's team places electronic sensors in employees' badges,
which includes a Bluetooth, a microphone (it doesn't record what
people say, but rather the tone of their voice, speaking speed,
and volume), a motion sensor to measure movement, and an infrared
beam.

A
sociometric sensor device.Sociometric
Solutions

The idea is that these analytic tools can help determine the
nature of the conversations people are having. For example, the
microphone can measure speaking tone, and the higher someone's
tone or the faster they speak can indicate how excited or
passionate they are at any given time.

The infrared can also sense if another badge is in sight, which
gives researchers an idea of how people stand when speaking to
others. For example, people who usually have others facing them
when speaking are more dominant personalities. On the other hand,
when two people are engaged in an interesting conversation, they
will likely mirror one another, which signals more equality.

"We’ve been
able to foretell, for example, which teams will win a business
plan contest, solely on the basis of data collected from team
members wearing badges at a cocktail
reception," Alex
Pentland,
a professor at MIT and also an advisor to Waber's group, wrote
for the Harvard Business Review.

Since privacy
is the biggest concern over the devices, after
behavioral/productivity reports are sent to individuals, their
identities are removed from the system so the names associated
with individual sensors are never
revealed to employers.

The
testing grounds

Bank of America got on board with the sensors a few years ago
when it wanted to study how group dynamics impacted
performance. It tested them out on 90
call center employees.Arena says that the
company discovered how important it was to allow employees to
take breaks together. During that time, employees would often
troubleshoot their workplace problems. While sensors didn't
monitor conversation, they did report "a cohesiveness was shared
between the coworkers," says Arena, and the company
eventually experienced
a 10 percent improvement in productivity by making some
workplace culture changes after the study.

Although Bank
of America tested its call center employees, Arena said he thinks
the data "has bigger ramifications
in professional jobs than anywhere else," because you will
inevitably be able to "understand how one person steps into
the room and influences others."

"It has greater ramifications in leadership than hourly workers,
but it's in the early stages." Arena is now
the head of global talent at General Motors, and told us the
company is considering "doing very similar things."

"What we hoped
to learn was how things influence interactions and how spaces
affect those interactions," Dave
Lathrop, director of workspace futures and strategy at the
company, told us.

Lathrop says
most of us don't know how we interact with others. For example,
if you have a dominating personality, you could be "forcing
people to shut down" and make them distrust you without even
knowing it.

"Yahoo and Best Buy are asking people to come back to the
office, which does suggest that there's a general belief that
when people get physically together, it's valuable," he
says. "We're at this magical moment where we
can do things that we couldn't do before ... having the analytics
that we do. ...As a researcher, I'm incredibly
hopeful that this will give us good data on the quality of
interactions between people."

But at the end of the day, employees need to feel
comfortable with the idea of being tracked, even if it's
anonymously — and that may take a while.